Cognitive Dissonance

Definition

Festinger's theory holds that inconsistency between cognitions produces an aversive state, and that people are motivated to reduce it by changing an attitude, changing a behaviour, adding consonant cognitions, or reducing the importance of the inconsistency.

The theory's most useful prediction is counter-intuitive: smaller incentives for counter-attitudinal behaviour produce larger attitude change, because a large incentive provides sufficient external justification and no dissonance arises.

History

Festinger set out the theory in 1957. The 1959 Festinger and Carlsmith study — participants paid one dollar or twenty dollars to describe a boring task as interesting, with the one-dollar group later rating it as more enjoyable — remains the canonical demonstration.

The theory dominated social psychology for two decades and generated more experiments than almost any other idea in the field.

Theory

Later work narrowed the conditions. Cooper and Fazio's new look model argued dissonance arises not from inconsistency as such but from feeling personally responsible for an aversive consequence that was foreseeable. Free choice, commitment and foreseeability all matter.

Self-perception theory (Bem) offered a rival account with no motivational state at all: people infer their attitudes from observing their own behaviour. Zanna and Cooper's misattribution work showed dissonance effects disappear when arousal is attributed elsewhere, which supports a genuine motivational state and is the strongest evidence against a pure self-perception reading. The current position is that both processes operate, in different ranges.

Research

The core paradigms — induced compliance, free choice, effort justification — have produced effects across decades, though the free-choice paradigm has a known methodological problem: Chen and Risen showed the standard spreading-of-alternatives measure is confounded, because choice reveals pre-existing preference even with no attitude change at all. Studies using the corrected design find smaller effects.

Cross-cultural work finds dissonance effects appear under different conditions rather than being absent: in several East Asian samples dissonance is more reliably produced by choices with interpersonal consequences than by choices affecting the self alone.

Applications

Attitude change and persuasion, health behaviour interventions using hypocrisy induction, understanding commitment escalation, and explaining why belief-disconfirming evidence sometimes strengthens the belief.

In clinical work it underlies the rationale for eliciting change talk from the client rather than supplying arguments, which is the mechanism motivational interviewing exploits.

Criticism

• The free-choice paradigm was confounded for fifty years before the problem was identified, and much of that literature cannot be interpreted as originally reported.
• Alternative explanations persist. Self-perception and self-affirmation accounts explain much of the same data.
• Vague scope. Almost any attitude shift can be narrated as dissonance reduction after the fact.
• Small original samples. The classic studies were run with sample sizes that would now be considered uninformative.

References

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
• Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.
• Cooper, J., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 229-266.
• Chen, M. K., & Risen, J. L. (2010). How choice affects and reflects preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(4), 573-594.